Every Internet user encounters them regularly: those nonsensical strings of characters that we’re asked to decipher before we can move on to the next page of a website. What some of you also know is that they are called captchas, and that the balance between protecting your site from spambots and driving away frustrated visitors is a delicate one.

The captcha market is forced to continuously increase the degrees of difficulty in its products as computer hacking becomes more advanced, and the battle’s biggest losers have become the increasingly befuddled Internet users and the businesses that try to serve them. Now there’s a new video animation technology available from NuCaptcha that the company touts as being both extremely user-friendly and highly secure.

Video offers the greatest advancement in captcha technology since it was first introduced ten years ago because the motion is near impossible for computers to read but very easy for humans. The first product launched on the NuCaptcha platform is NuCaptcha Basic, a free service for websites and blogs that provides up to 25,000 captchas per month with themes such as the environment, sports and abstract.

Other products in the captcha space are made by Google and Microsoft, to name two, but this is the first one to incorporate video animation. NuCaptcha was launched by Leap Technologies Inc.

According to research from Frank N. Magid Associates, conducted on behalf of Metacafe, consumers still prefer short-form video online. The study shows that short, "professional" videos account for 8 of the 10 most popular video genres. That includes music videos, television show clips and movie previews. And in a telling symptom of the Internet age, one in four respondents claim that these short professional videos are more entertaining than full-length television shows.

Some other findings include:

• 55% of online video viewers find online video ads just as, if not more, acceptable than TV ads, up 3% year-over-year.
• The coveted viewers ages 18 to 24 accounted for the greatest increase in weekly online video viewership.
• 85% of males and 68% of females watch online video weekly — a 15% and 27% increase over 2009, respectively.

There are a few important takeaways here. First, keep your videos relatively short — if you have a lot of content to publish, consider breaking it up into smaller parts so viewers will watch everything. Second, try to make your videos as professional (and entertaining) as possible — grainy videos and unsteady camera work is fine for a quick blooper, but not good for branding purposes. Third, don't be afraid of running ads before, during or after your videos. Consumers have come to accept that the price to pay for free video content is often a brief advertisement here and there.

Today Amazon is officially rolling out its 70-percent royalty option for authors and publishers who use the Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP), a potentially more lucrative avenue for self-publishers that the company first announced back in January. Authors and publishers who choose the new option will receive 70 percent of the list price net delivery costs ($.15 per MB), which means that they would make $6.25 on a Kindle book sold for $8.99 as opposed to making $3.15 with the DTP standard royalty option.

The 70-percent royalty option is in addition to and will not replace the existing DTP standard royalty option. The new option applies to books sold from the Kindle Store for Kindle, Kindle DX, or one of the Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry, PC, Mac and Android phones, and books must be sold to U.S. customers and satisfy the following requirements to qualify:

•    Listed between $2.99 and $9.99 (and at least 20 percent below the physical book’s lowest list price)
•    Available in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights
•    Included in a broad set of features in the Kindle Store, such as text-to-speech (more features to be included)
•    Offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices

In addition to the higher royalty option, Amazon also announced improvements in the Kindle DTP such as a more intuitive Bookshelf feature and a simplified two-step process for publishing. The Kindle Digital Text Platform is a fast and easy self-publishing tool that lets anyone upload and format their books for sale in the Kindle Store.

There are many reasons you should be considering adding a .CO to your domain portfolio (securing your brand name, domain speculation) but the following might just be one of the best in the short term. 

Domain registration company LCN today announced they have begun offering one free year of web hosting to customers who pre-order a .CO domain name. 

The LCN.com hosting package offers customers 2GB of diskspace, 2GB of monthly data transfer, and 20 email accounts with anti-spam and virus protection system MailGuard. Additional features such as online advertising vouchers, and free web design software from Serif, free Fotolia stock photos, and 500 free Mailing Manager email marketing credits are also included with the package.

Mark Boost, Managing Director, LCN.com, said: “The new .CO domain extension will provide fantastic opportunities for individuals and businesses who wish to register exclusive domain names, where .com and .co.uk variations have previously been taken. “We think this will be one of the most important new domain launches in the past 25 years and to let customers take full advantage we wanted to offer them .CO hosting for absolutely no cost.”

The rumor launched by Kevin Rose about Google working on a social platform to be called Google Me is taking on a new twist as former Facebook CTO, Adam D’Angelo, steps into the dance by saying that it’s “a real project.”

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